By Michael R. Marrus. Michael R. Marrus is the dean of the
graduate school of the University of Toronto and the author of "The Holocaust in
History."January 4, 2004Gulag: A History
By Anne Applebaum
Doubleday, 677 pages, $35
Contemplating the ravages of imperialism, the depredations of two world wars,
fascism, communism and the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt once referred to "our
terrible century," denoting a time of unprecedented killing, unspeakable
tyrannies and inhumanity on a scale scarcely imagined previously.

Of all the catastrophes of the last century, however, probably the least-probed
is the gulag, summarized by Anne Applebaum as "the vast network of labor camps
that were once scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, from
the islands of the White Sea to the shores of the Black Sea, from the Arctic
Circle to the plains of central Asia, from Murmansk to Vorkuta to Kazakhstan,
from central Moscow to the Leningrad suburbs." Surveying this ocean of misery
and futility, from its inception at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution to its
collapse with the downfall of communism, Applebaum has produced a remarkable
book, indispensable for understanding our recent past.

An acronym for the Russian words for main camp administration, gulag came to
stand not only for the camps but also the system's many constituent elements for
the terrorization, exploitation, punishment and elimination of millions,
sometimes entire nations, from the harshest dungeons to remote exile
colonies--"a country within a country, almost a separate civilization,"
Applebaum notes, with "its own laws, its own customs, its own morality, even its
own slang."

How many ended up in the gulag? Despite her extensive research into relevant
archives and a vast descriptive literature, Applebaum is properly cautious in
estimating. So many died of hunger, exposure or disease, were shot, or simply
disappeared, but many were also released. With Hitler's invasion of the USSR in
June 1941, hundreds of thousands flocked to the Red Army--but hundreds of
thousands were arrested and sent to camps, together with more than 2.3 million
German prisoners of war, more than 1 million other Europeans and about 600,000
Japanese. At any given time, the total number of inmates was about 2 million,
Applebaum contends. Over the years, she concludes, the total number of forced
laborers in the USSR was staggering--28.7 million. The gulag reached its zenith
after World War II, prompted by Stalin's mania to repress his presumed enemies.

Death rates reached a high during WW II. More than 350,000 perished in 1942, one
in four prisoners, and nearly 268,000, or one in five, in 1943. "In all, well
over two million people died in the camps and colonies of the Gulag during the
war years, not taking into account those who died in exile and other forms of
imprisonment." The total number of prisoner deaths, if I understand Applebaum
correctly, is impossible to compute: Official statistics cite 2.75 million, but
the true figure is certainly greater. Depending on how and who one counts, and
including the executed and non-Soviets, the dead may number 10 million, 12
million or even 20 million. No one knows for sure.

From the vast expansion of the system in 1929, the hallmark of the gulag, and
what distinguished it from the Nazis' wartime extermination of the Jews, was the
harnessing of inmates to the goals of forced industrialization. Whether the
gulag was carefully planned or allowed to grow haphazardly--a debate upon which
Applebaum does not pronounce definitively--there is no doubt about Josef
Stalin's fundamental responsibility. Obsessed with the vision of gargantuan
construction projects upon which thousands toiled together, the Soviet leader
took a personal interest in the development of the camps and the regimen of
their hapless victims.

From the start, there were gigantic efforts, the best known of which, in the
early 1930s, was a canal that would link the waters of the White Sea to those of
the Baltic, "a project of extreme, even foolhardy ambition," Applebaum observes,
which "may have been part of the project's appeal to Stalin." About 170,000
prisoners and exiles, equipped with primitive tools, and sometimes using their
bare hands, worked on this megalomaniac scheme, with predictable
results--disorganization and confusion in construction, untold suffering and
huge mortality--largely to no avail: The canal was never deep enough, and the
project finished as a colossal failure. Eventually, "the range of economic
activity within the Gulag was as wide as the range of economic activity within
the USSR itself," Applebaum concludes, justifying her reference to "the
Camp-Industrial Complex." As with the canal, it turned out that forced labor
made no economic sense: quite apart from its injustice and inhumanity, penal
work colonies were inimical to economic progress, and the system ultimately
collapsed under the weight of its own waste, inefficiency and incompetence.

Who were the prisoners in these camps? Applebaum charts the changing composition
of the inmate population from the 1930s, when the great majority were the
so-called kulaks--typically, prosperous peasants who opposed, or were deemed to
have opposed, Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture; to the war years,
when the regime turned specifically against non-Russian nationalities; to the
postwar period, when select ethnic minorities, opposition groups, the military
and Jews were targeted. In the end there is no single theme or hierarchy of
victimization--unlike the Nazis' maniacal obsession with the Jews--but rather a
shifting, restless, incoherent search for enemies to repress.

Most important for our understanding is the fundamental irrationality and
absurdity of the process that consigned people to the camps, and the utter
senselessness of the system that kept them there. People could be arrested for
genuine opposition, for casual nonconformity, or for no reason at all. " 'Before
my arrest,' " wrote one woman swept up in the camps, " 'I led a very ordinary
life, typical of a professional Soviet woman who didn't belong to the Party. I
worked hard but took no particular part in politics or public affairs. My real
interests lay with home and family.' " While investigations, arrests and
confessions sometimes extracted under torture ostensibly occurred within the
framework of a legal system, persecution typically proceeded without foundation
in reason or evidence, with results that were often surreal. "By 1939," writes
Applebaum, "telling a joke, or hearing one, about Stalin; being late for work;
having the misfortune to be named by a terrified friend or jealous neighbor as a
'co-conspirator' in a nonexistent plot; owning four cows in a village where most
people owned one; stealing a pair of shoes; being a cousin of Stalin's wife;
stealing a pen and some paper from one's office in order to give them to a
schoolchild who had none; all of these could, under the right circumstances,
lead to a sentence in a Soviet concentration camp"

Drawing on first-hand accounts of camp survivors as well as official records,
Applebaum has several chapters on the experience of the zeks, or prisoners--men,
women and children--in extraordinarily diverse circumstances, ranging from slimy
dungeons in urban prisons to the " 'earth dugouts' " in the far north: "a space
cleaned of snow," wrote one inmate of a camp in Karelia in the 1940s, "with the
upper layer of earth removed. The walls and roof were made of round, rough logs.
The whole structure was covered with another layer of earth and snow. The
entrance to the dugout was decked out with a canvas door . . . in one corner
stood a barrel of water. In the middle stood a metal stove, complete with a
metal pipe leading out through the roof, and a barrel of kerosene."

Although theoretically regulated by central administrators, the camps never
functioned uniformly and never performed as they were supposed to: corruption,
inefficiency, cruelty and violence were nearly everywhere. Prisoners adapted,
succumbed, resisted, or were corrupted by the system: They developed their own
camp argot, tried to evade punishment, and turned things to their advantage.
Sometimes, common criminals pitted themselves against the other inmates, a
background condition that rose to the level of a national struggle in the
gulag's last years. Applebaum recounts stories of some who triumphed
magnificently over adversity and dehumanization, and others who sank beneath the
surface--reminiscent of the walking dead found in Nazi concentration camps. She
recounts scores of stories--some of them heartbreaking--that must stand for the
millions that can never be told.

Vast and ghastly as is this panorama, one of the remarkable things about the
gulag is how little it has been commemorated, memorialized or discussed, even
among its millions of victims. To be sure, there was a phase of public
accusation, admirably described here, and to which former inmate Alexander
Solzhenitsyn contributed so importantly, first with his novel "One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich," available in the early 1960s, and then with his
stunning, three-volume history of the camps, "The Gulag Archipelago," published
in English in 1973. But Applebaum is right: We in the West are reluctant to
contemplate the very worst about the Soviet regime, our stout-hearted ally
against Hitler; and the Russians themselves, with legions of the complicit and
with a reluctance, sometimes, to admit the very worst about the former Soviet
Union, are disinclined to dwell upon their country's tragic past. All the more
important is this well-documented, admirably crafted and authoritative book,
reminding us of a somber landmark in Arendt's "terrible century."

BETWEEN THE LINES WITH ANNE APPLEBAUM

A holocaust's shadowy imprint

By Robin Dougherty, 2/8/2004

Anne
Applebaum realized the world was ready for a history of the gulag, the Soviet
Union's infamous prison system, as she watched tourists at an outdoor market in
Prague purchase ''the tin Lenin and Brezhnev images that Soviet schoolchildren
once pinned to their uniforms."

''The sight
struck me as odd," she writes in ''Gulag: A History" (Doubleday, $35), which
became a 2003 National Book Award finalist for nonfiction. ''Most of the people
buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be
sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected to the wearing of a
hammer and sickle on a T-shirt. . . . While the subject of one mass murder fills
us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh."

How is it that,
from the end of the Russian Revolution to the Gorbachev era, nearly 30 million
people served harsh sentences in 500 prison complexes spread out over the Soviet
Union -- and perhaps as many as 20 million died -- and their stories are largely
unknown to us? Applebaum, a historian and editorial columnist for The Washington
Post, talks about closing the gaps in modern memory.

Q.What's the biggest misconception about the gulag?

A.
I think there are several misconceptions. [There is] a misconception of how
people got arrested. We think of people who are dissidents, who were doing
things in defiance of the state. From the 1920s through the middle of the 1950s,
the people who were arrested were -- it was almost completely arbitrary. . . .

Also, the size
of it, the extent of it, the economic significance of it. People tend to think
that small groups of people were herded into cold areas. Many camps were in the
middle of cities. They were yards away from ordinary life.

Q.And the gulag didn't start with Stalin?

A.
That is another misconception. It clearly begins with Lenin.

Q.Do you find that Americans know only about Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
experience in the gulag and very little else?

A.
I found all kinds of things. There were people who, when I said I was writing
about concentration camps, were confused [because they] didn't know there were
camps in Russia. Some people were aware of Solzhenitsyn and thought it was a
small phenomenon involving a few political prisoners. [It] was central to the
Soviet system and . . . it was not at all known, even to educated people.

Q.We think that everyone was digging for coal with their bare hands above the
Arctic Circle, but really there was an entire range of jobs for prisoners.

A.
Yeah, a range of jobs and a range of camps. Some camps that were really deadly.
Some were located in cities. . . . A lot of Moscow was built by prisoners.

Q.You point out that the accounts we have are overwhelmingly by political
prisoners, writers. Describe the average gulag inmate whom we don't know as much
about.

A.
The vast majority were peasants and workers arrested for so-called economic
crimes -- not things you and I would consider to be a crime. If from your
workplace you took home some extra candles because you had no electricity at
home. Or gleaners -- people who picked up wheat in the field. They [served] 5 to
10 years.

Q.Can you talk about the resources you used -- the Soviet-era archives and
memoirs?

A.
The archives are a funny thing. . . . There are many. Each archive is a separate
kingdom. Each is run by an archivist, and he decides how he wants it to be
ruled. The ones I used -- in one particular archive they'll let you do whatever
you want. In another, they won't, and there appears to be no real reason for it.
. . .

A lot of stuff
was the ordinary, day-to-day records of the gulag -- inspectors' reports,
letters from the camp operators to Moscow. A tremendous amount of information.
It's not sensational, but they give a picture of day-to-day life.

Q.You interviewed former camp guards and prisoners. Who didn't you get to talk
to?

A.
There are a couple of categories of people I would have loved to have found that
I never found. One was children who were in the camps. A lot of these people
grew up to be criminals, and they are hard to track down. [Also] criminals
didn't keep memoirs. Real criminals -- as opposed to people who stole three
pieces of grain. We mostly know of them from descriptions of political
prisoners, [but] their world as described by them is pretty much absent.

Q.Talk about writing a history of a society that devoted a lot of energy to
propaganda.

A.
There's a section of the gulag [archives] collection dedicated to the propaganda
of the system. ''We performed X number of plays and had X political
discussions." . . . And then there are the inspectors' reports saying too many
people are dying. . . . I have no faith in the death statistics. Clearly there
was an attempt to disguise the amount of death.

Robin
Dougherty, a writer and critic, lives in Washington, D.C. Her column appears
every other week. She
can be reached at inkrd@aol.com.

Paradoxes of public opinion: People worry about the victims of the tsunami but
forget about the victims in Darfur. The O.J. Simpson trial competed for ratings
with the Rwandan genocide. The Holocaust is commemorated with due solemnity
(important to all sides in this period of new anti-Semitism), but talk of "those
gulags" is considered boring. Indeed, in the introduction to her Pulitzer
Prize-winning book "Gulag: A History," Anne Applebaum registers her amazement on
seeing how Western tourists purchase Soviet-era souvenirs in liberated Prague.
The same tourists would never dream of parading Nazi symbols as keepsakes. In
his book "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million," English novelist
Martin Amis attempts to reach an imaginative understanding of Stalin's era and
of the accommodating attitudes of leftist intellectuals in England toward Soviet
totalitarianism (the intellectual left in the United States, France and Israel
has also had cause for remorse on this matter) - as well as of the reasons why
the study of Soviet history often evokes a bitter laugh.

It is pointless to debate whether it was the Nazi totalitarian
regime or the Soviet one that caused more human suffering; one infinity is no
greater than another. The comparison, however, is legitimate when one of the two
systems can shed light on the other. Amis' bitter laughter while studying Soviet
history is associated with the contrast between utopian hopes and the means of
achieving them; between humanistic slogans and reality; between the idealist
intentions of the Russian revolutionaries and the cynicism with which they
forced their social experiment on hundreds of millions of people who may have
had their own recipes for happiness. These contradictions were clearly reflected
in the empire of concentration/forced labor camps, which was part of the Soviet
Union throughout its history and which, in the wake of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's
"The Gulag Archipelago," has come to be widely known as the gulag.

Concentration camps were neither a Russian invention nor a
German one. They were first established in 1896 by Spaniards in Cuba, to keep
the peasants from supporting local rebels. At that time, the camps supposedly
served as a "humane" substitute for massacre. The word "concentration" in the
name of this institution is short for "reconcentration" - the transfer of
population centers in order to separate civilians from guerrilla combatants.
Nevertheless, the age-old drive for genocide found expression here too: It
manifested itself in the failure to create the infrastructure necessary for the
transfer, in the non-provision (whether deliberate or negligent) of food and
medicine, and in the day-to-day cruelty of the perpetrators. The routines of
local civilization were shattered, the needs of the community were not
addressed, and thousands of women, children and elderly people were left to die
of malnutrition and disease without staining the soldiers' hands with their
blood.

The same
method was used by the British in their war on the Boers in South Africa, with
similar results. It should be noted, however, that quite a few Englishmen - and
Englishwomen - struggled against this policy and went to great lengths to help
the prisoners. There is no knowledge of similar activity among the German
citizenry when its army hunted the Herero tribe in Africa in 1904, exterminating
most of its people and incarcerating the rest in concentration camps (the first
genocide of the 20th century). The German colonial powers then contributed to
the history of the concentration camp by introducing the idea of forced labor;
medical experiments were also conducted there by (literally) the teachers of
Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz "Angel of Death" 40 years later.

A cheap alternativeThe history of the concentration camps is surveyed in Joel
Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot's "Le siecle des camps: Detention, concentration,
extermination; Cent ans de mal radical," on which Applebaum relies. She also
draws on numerous studies about the concentration camps established in Russia in
1918 at Trotsky and Lenin's initiatives. The camps were then viewed as a
temporary measure. The creation of a just socialist regime was supposed to
eliminate the conditions that led to crime, and with them the need for
penitentiaries. This belief, another cause for bitter laughter, impeded the
building of new prisons; instead, "enemies of the people" and suspects arrested
in great numbers were placed in temporary facilities. This solution ("humane" in
comparison to swift executions, also fashionable at the time) was relatively
cheap, a fact that caused it, paradoxically, to spread and endure, continuing to
exist even today in countries such as North Korea and China.

The camps served several purposes. The goal of the political
police was to have suspected opponents of the regime isolated or vindictively
punished, whereas the people's commissariat of justice sought to reeducate
prisoners through labor. All the parties involved wanted the camps to be run as
economically self-supporting enterprises, getting maximum yield at a minimal
investment. During years when food was scarce throughout Russia, this minimum
became a death sentence.

The number of prisoners grew steadily, reaching millions by
the late 1930s. They were put to work creating infrastructure in areas where
survival was difficult, building roads, factories and entire cities, cutting
timber in the forests of the north, working in mines, in agriculture and in
industry. Marxist political economy recognizes that slave labor is ineffective
due to the lack of incentive - but Stalin's henchmen created an incentive: they
tied the size of the prisoners' food rations to their labor output. Those who
met the "quotas" got more to eat, those who did not, got less. The system was
gradually refined, so that eventually the ration scale came to include 17
different norms of nutrition - without, of course, taking into account the
systematic theft of food supplies on the way to the mess.

Thus prisoners whose bodies faltered received less food and
grew even weaker. They eventually died of hunger- related illnesses, in anguish
and humiliation. But even the maximal rations fell short of the calories
expended in intense labor; the sturdiest of inmates, therefore, would also slip
into exhaustion and occasionally lose their self-discipline and sanity.
Conditions improved when increased industrial performance was needed; however,
when waves of arrests caused the labor force to swell, matters tended to go in
the other direction. At certain periods (especially in 1938) numerous labor
camps actually became extermination camps, killing not with gas but with cold,
hunger, disease, abuse by criminal inmates and even executions, carried out
after a brief, pseudo-legal procedure.

But since death in the gulag was not immediate, a society with
its own internal rules developed in the camps. Opportunities arose for
individuals to avoid the slippery slope. Using survivor testimony, scholarly
research and archival material, Applebaum constructs a comprehensive picture of
life in the camps and traces the history of the gulag until its dismantling in
the late 1980s. She surveys fluctuations in the social and ethnic composition of
the prisoner population and shows how the fate that different groups could
expect at different times was influenced by such events as the war with Germany
and repeated waves of terror. She also describes the kinds of "lottery tickets"
that individual men, women and children could draw at different stages in their
suffering, and the dangers and moral dilemmas with which they had to grapple.

The camps' cultural legacyNo aspect of the gulag experience is left out of the book.
Using documented examples, the author tells of family bonds trampled, of infants
and children abandoned to a dismal fate when their mothers were arrested, of
torture. She describes the deadly negligence of the authorities within the
facilities and in the transports, rape and sexual exploitation, abysmal sanitary
conditions, the menace posed by criminal inmates, hunger, unending workdays, the
lack of warm clothing, sadistic forms of solitary confinement, disease, horrors
encountered while fleeing the camps, and the different ways of dying.

Nor does the book neglect to survey the factors that aided
survival: culture and education sections that operated within the camps,
hospitals and their devoted (if under-equipped) staff, the rare and precious
opportunities to practice one's profession, or separate cases of good fortune.
Applebaum also describes the practically mandatory ways of deceiving the camp
authorities but avoids noting that dishonesty in the workplace - crucial for
survival in the gulag - lingers up to our own day as part of the cultural legacy
of the camps.

Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982; author of "Kolyma Tales") once
said that the subject of the gulag was vast enough for 10 writers like Tolstoy
and 100 writers like Solzhenitsyn. It is also vast enough for thousands of
historians. The uniqueness of Applebaum's book lies in its combination of a
comprehensive vision, accessible prose and a sufficiently penetrating
understanding of the material. Among historians there are Holocaust deniers, and
there is also a school that denies the dimensions of the Stalinist terror. The
main argument of the latter concerns the numbers of people incarcerated in the
gulags. After perestroika, historians first gained access to the archives of the
gulag administration, and efficiently discovered documents quoting smaller
numbers (for example, 2.5 million prisoners in the peak years, in contrast to
the estimate of 7 million made by Robert Conquest, the classical historian of
Stalinist Russia. Conquest's estimate is conservative in comparison with the
insistence of many of the survivors that peak years saw about 10 million
prisoners in Soviet camps).

Anne Applebaum sidesteps this trap (although she cautiously
leans toward the conservative statistics). Having spoken with survivors and read
prisoner testimonies, she is well aware that numbers can be doctored, accounts
falsified, and that statistics may fail to reflect a great many realities. She
also knows how to read the reports of gulag inspectors, which strike her as
surprisingly honest, about the conditions in the camps. As one survivor, author
Lev Razgon, explains in his memoirs, only an initiated reader can understand the
true meaning of a "shortage of drying facilities" noted in a report - i.e., that
the following morning people would go to work wearing clothes that had not dried
during the night and freeze to death in them.

Applebaum's contribution to the study of the history of the
gulag also involves her use of new archival research (conducted by herself and
others) to authenticate stories previously regarded as folklore - for example,
the case of the 6,114 peasants who were brought to an uninhabited island on the
Ob River and left there without food or supplies. Some 4,000 of them died within
four months; the survivors were sent to prison on charges of cannibalism.

It is regrettable that after all the dedicated research that
went into the project, the book was not edited with similar care. There are many
small errors - misprinted words, distortions of Russian terms and names, even
minor factual mistakes. The same errors were reproduced in the Hebrew
translation. An editor of Russian origin would have caught most of them. Such
inaccuracies are typical of the haste with which books on "ratings-worthy"
subjects are published. Applebaum's book does not fall under this category,
although it, too, may eventually become dated: Understanding the gulag is an
ongoing process, and because some archival material has yet to become
accessible, new facts and discoveries are bound to surface. Judging by the
current situation, however, the need and the possibility for a next update will
not arise very soon.

Why the silence?Toward the end of the book the author proposes answers to
several important questions: How is it that the gulag's end in the late 1980s -
just like its emergence - attracted virtually no public attention? Why is the
commemoration of the victims so subdued, why is it not massively endorsed by the
state? Why are various circles in Russia reluctant to see the gulag's memory
perpetuated? Who is interested in having it silenced again? And why is it of
practical importance for the world's free nations to understand the gulag
phenomenon down to its details? Applebaum claims she wrote the book not to help
prevent the recurrence of the concentration camps, but out of a sad certainty
that such camps will indeed recur in any place where those who are different are
treated only as means to an end. Or, one might add, only as obstacles.

Nor should it be forgotten that forced labor camps still exist
in the world's last remaining communist countries. When my nice new electric
kettle, made in China, burns down unprovoked, or a button falls off a shirt that
only yesterday I succumbed to the temptation of buying, I wonder whether this is
not a signal from a concentration camp. Chinese camps sometimes hide behind the
facades of factories. The impossibility of determining which industrial facility
really is an innocent factory was explained in 1992, in the present tense, by
survivor Harry Hongda Wu. Applebaum devotes only one sentence, and not an
entirely accurate one, to the Chinese camps.

In 1930, gulag prisoners managed to signal to
timber-processing workers in England and the U.S. that the wood imported from
Russia was the product of forced labor. The attempt, however, was futile: The
ban on Russian timber only caused prisoners to be reassigned; instead of felling
trees, they were sent to dig the canal between the Baltic Sea and the White Sea,
with death toll estimates ranging from 50,000 to 200,000. By contrast, what can
improve the fates of political prisoners is, one must agree with Applebaum,
international political pressure. It is to be hoped that the policy makers and
public opinion might be willing to exert it.

Despite the great many striking quotations from personal
stories that Applebaum enlists to demonstrate her claims, readers seeking an
in-depth understanding of the gulag phenomenon will need to look beyond this
historical- journalistic study. In order to come closer to life in the camps, to
understand its rhythms, to conjure it up in our imagination, and to let it place
ourselves and our ordinary lives into perspective, we must read at least some of
the survivor stories themselves. A book by Julius Margolin, an Israeli
intellectual born in Pinsk, about his years in the gulag is still awaiting a
translator, as are other fascinating biographies; many are available in English
but few in Hebrew. The gulag is one of the subjects that must be incorporated
into the formal-education curricula of the 21st century. Applebaum's book can
provide a good comprehensive background for studying and teaching the gulag, in
conjunction with those survivor narratives that attempt - with some measure of
success - to convey the flavor of individual camp ordeals.

Prof.
Leona Toker of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is the author of "Return from
the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors," published in 2000.